Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones's acclaimed novel (1) takes its name from the narrator of Great Expectations. This was the first Dickens book JL J JL Jones read, one he encountered as a child, returned to many times, and, in his own words, as he got older and better at reading, "began to see the book in a slightly different light. (2)" Subsequently as a novelist himself, he paid homage to it by using Great Expectations as a founding text for Mister Pip, engaging in a dialogue with it as a text which has "entered his DNA. (3)" Rewriting classics, a postmodernist trend, implies various phenomena of transposition, transformation and hybridization. Jones transposes his predecessor's Victorian novel to a completely different cultural context, that is to say twentieth-century Bougainville where the native pupils listen to their teacher's daily reading of Great Expectations in class and begin to identify with Pip, the white Victorian character. Later on in the unfolding of the novel, native elements are grafted on Dickens's original story by their teacher, the Scheherazade-like Mr. Watts, who, while telling the rebels his life story, his "Pacific version of Great Expectations" fuses native and nonnative, literary and oral, personal and mythological tales. The combination of stories and the "contamination" of the hypotext (4) is a vital process for this character who must continue at all costs to deliver new episodes every night to his curious and blood-thirsty audience. In the same way, contemporary authors continuously draw from old stories to revive and update them: this also constitutes a vital literary practice which is extremely valuable for successive generations of readers, who are thus exposed to oeuvres belonging to our literary pantheon. Original texts are constantly rewritten and modernized to incorporate other experiences, literary traditions and cultural perspectives. I would like to examine the literary implications of Lloyd Jones's playing with and manipulating a Western canonical hypotext, Great Expectations, in order to create original hypertexts which are subtly interwoven in his novel, as well as the political and cultural context to which these hypertexts are anchored. Questions about the role of the Western work in a native environment, its dramatic but also salutary impact on the inhabitants, the "purity" of the canonical text and the power of literature in general will also be addressed.
